Beware the Jabberwock Has a Cover

Here's the long-awaited cover for the first book in my Post Cold War trilogy featuring ill-starred former FBI agent Burke Hill. Beware the Jabberwock will be out soon as an ebook. Here's the plot blurb:


As the Cold War sputters to a close and the Soviet Union disintegrates, international telephone intercepts trigger a CIA investigation into the nebulous codeword "Jabberwock." Burke Hill, whose tarnished FBI career ended years earlier after dismissal by a surly J. Edgar Hoover, is recruited to help an old CIA buddy, Cameron Quinn, whose superiors doubt Jabberwock's dangerous potential. When an accident stops Quinn in Hong Kong, the CIA brass warns Hill to drop the investigation. Knowing Quinn's fears about the operation, Hill and Quinn's daughter, Lorelei, continue the chase. Rogue elements on both sides of the old Iron Curtain work to stop them, along with a relentless Federal bureaucracy. As the clock ticks down on Jabberwork, Burke and Lori realize they alone are the only hope of stopping a plot to assassinate the American and Russian presidents.


An international thriller,  Beware the Jabberwock starts out in Vienna, then switches to the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains, after that Washington, D.C. The characters take us to a beach on Cyprus, to Tel Aviv, Israel and Hong Kong before swirling about the eastern half of the U.S. from New Orleans to Niagara Falls. Much of it takes place on an island off the Gulf Coast of Florida.


It's a tale about what people accustomed to having power will do to cling to it when circumstances threaten their hold. Sometimes they form unholy alliances in an attempt to maintain the status quo. That's what Burke Hill and Lorelei Quinn encounter when the end of the Cold War threatens to leave groups of old enemies out in the cold.


The life-threatening spiral accelerates after Burke and Lori attempt to prove Cam Quinn was not drunk when his rental car crashed on a dark night in Hong Kong. You'll have a chance to read the whole exciting story shortly when Beware the Jabberwock appears as an ebook for the Kindle.

Writing About Faraway Places

I was more brave in my early days of novel writing when it came to the subject of setting. In my more recent published mysteries, I've stuck mostly with locales that I visited personally. Sometimes I brushed up my recollection with trips to the Internet or maps or books, but I described places as I had seen them with my own eyes.

My first post-Cold War thriller, which remains unpublished, though not because of its settings, began in Vienna. At the time (1990) I had never visited the Austrian capital, but I read lots of descriptions and stories about its role as a hotbed of espionage activity. It fit the bill for the ambiance I needed in my story. The scene took place in a restaurant. I didn't identify its location, so I would have no problem with the geography.

A little later in the book, I sent the protagonist to Israel for a rendezvous in the old port city of Jaffa. I read several travel guides and structured the area as best I could figure it. I dodged a bullet on that one. When I visited the area eight years later, I discovered it was quite different from what I had imagined.

I placed another scene on Cyprus. For this one I used a deserted area on the cost in the Turkish section of the island. I had no qualms about this one. Then one of the main characters journeyed to Hong Kong, a place I had spent a few days in about three years earlier. I felt comfortable in my descriptions there.

The final chapters took place in Toronto, another city I had visited a few years earlier. All in all I was rather pleased at my coverage of faraway places, some of which I had never seen. But others have done an even more credible job. Martin Cruz Smith in Gorky Park and Joseph Finder's The Moscow Club, written in he early eighties, both read as if the writers had an inside look at Soviet Russia.